First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (13 page)

“What lesson?” I whispered.

“There’s no such thing as unconditional love.”

I closed my eyes. The thorned and barbed words were as I had expected. What I wanted to say, what pushed against my lips so hard to come out, and yet, remained behind my teeth was—

 
Let me help you unlearn that lesson.

Sam

I was dying, absolutely dying. You would think that having a bunch of emotions inside me, it would be easy to just pick one and explore it. It’s the hardest fucking thing to do in the world. It’s so much easier to shut down, to close off, to protect myself and never look at them at all. I’d done more than ignore my emotional past. I’d put it in a box inside me, and I’d padlocked the box and thrown it and its key in separate oceans. And now, here with Amy, she was asking me to find the key, and the box, and unlock everything

We walked in silence for a long time, the peaceful presence of her enough. Words weren’t needed. Most people fill the space between them and other humans with speech. It clouds everything if words are used like that. Conversations that have meaning, or that teach—that’s different. But chatter for the sake of chatter is like crappy junk food.

It just makes you feel full, and then sick, and then you regret you ever partook.

Amy stopped at a brick building, weirdly angled into not-quite an L shape. She punched a code into the security door and took my hand, fingers entwining as we went in. We walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and were in an apartment the size of a healthy walk-in closet.

“Is this your apartment?” I said. “This is the whole thing?”

“Pretty much. There’s a bathroom right there.” She opened the door two or three feet, and then pushed something—I realized it was a futon—aside in order to open the door the whole way.

“This is your
entire
apartment?” I said, incredulous.

She frowned “Yeah, it’s mine. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing is wrong with it. It’s...” I looked around. “It’s quirky. I like it.”

Her shoulders lowered and she sighed. “Thanks.”

“This must be dirt cheap,” I said.

She grinned. “Yes, it is. And no roommates.”

A brief image of Joe coming out into the kitchen to grab sex food for Trevor and Darla floated through my mind. “What a luxury.”

“I don’t want to talk about my housing situation, Sam.”

She sat down on the futon, her body so graceful I enjoyed just watching how she moved, the curve of her hip, the stretch of her calf, how her wrist pivoted as she stretched, then folded herself into comfort. Mimicking her, I folded my legs and sat directly across, nervous yet fully present.

She took my hands. “I want to talk about us.”

“Is there an ‘us’?” I asked.

“That’s up to us.”

“Well then, what does
us
think?”

She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “
Us
thinks that
us
needs to work this out.”

“Well,
us
is really, really, really sorry for being such an asshole four and a half years ago.”

“
Us
is pleased that
us
realizes that he’s an asshole.”

“Oh,
us
is now
he
?” We both laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

The sound of my dad’s scream echoed through my ears, how he had bellowed what a worthless piece of shit I was, and how he had ordered me to go to Bible college, and how, when he punched me with the full force of his rage, for the first time in my life, I had hit back. All of it poured into my mind, into my soul, as I looked Amy in the eye and I had to compartmentalize, and shut that shit down, and push it away, and still look at her and be a human being.

The familiar thrashings of anxiety, or panic—or whatever the fuck you called this intruder inside my body that took over when I least expected it—made me feel like I was nine different people in my own head, all at once. I couldn’t tell her the truth about what Dad had done when I had gone home from that debate, because I couldn’t share how damaged I really was. Not that I thought that alone would drive her away, but I thought her knowing might drive
me
away, and I didn’t want to be that guy again.

I felt like I had been drowning for years, and that Amy had reached out and pulled me to shore, given me CPR and got me breathing again. Each ragged breath I took right now, as I stared into her eyes and tried to figure out what to say next, was one more breath I didn’t have to take alone. The words all just felt like stabs, so I turned the words off, reached over, stretching myself fully, and kissed her. The skin of her jaw was soft and hard at once, and her lips melted into mine.

“Amy,” I whispered, the need growing so swiftly inside me, as if saying her name could make all of this more real.

Amy

Real. This was
real
. Sam was kissing me again, and we were in my apartment, and we weren’t high school students any more. No artificial barriers. No classrooms, no coaches, no parents. An ache deep inside came to the surface, breaking like a cresting wave, and I leaned into the kiss, my hands hungry for more of him, palms reaching under his t-shirt, hands meeting hot, firm flesh with rippled muscles and the movement of his body against mine as his hands echoed my own need.

Four years.

For years I’d waited and wondered what might have been. Would we have been together through college? Would we have gone to the same school, or just spent our weeks apart, together on weekends? Getting married now, after graduation? Some of my friends were engaged right now, a few of them actively planning weddings.

Whatever wondering I had faded fast as the hot push of Sam’s loving hands against my breasts made me moan his name. A penetrating overwhelm made my body go hard and soft at once. For all I’d built up this moment in my head, reality wasn’t letting me down.

I wasn’t letting go, either. As our mouths and hands explored each other, Sam’s apologized, too. I could feel it in how tender he was, how he alternated between passion and restraint. Could a kiss say “I’m sorry”?

Could the next one say, “Let’s try again”?

And the third ask, “May I make it up to you”?

I wasn’t the same Amy who cried for months and checked my phone compulsively two hundred times a day, waiting for a text that never came. That girl was long gone, replaced by the woman who pressed her belly against Sam’s, whose arms and hands and lips gave as much as he took, and who wasn’t going to allow everything to be this easy, if that’s what I wanted more than anything in the world.

Because
easy
wasn’t cutting it.

Easy was the easy way out.

Breaking the kiss, we panted for a few breaths, eyes meeting. In his I saw so many emotions—desire, regret, excitement—and I imagined I mirrored those right back.

“Why, Sam? Why
now
?”

Our knees pressed into the futon, both of us half upright, arms wrapped around but pulled back. My breasts rose and fell with each fevered inhale and exhale, while Sam’s abs worked hard against his shirt, his breathing no less labored than my own.

“Because when I touch you I feel like the world makes sense.”

The cloth of my futon rubbed against my knees, the raspy sound amplified a thousand times in my ears. Moonlight spilled in through my window, and the air went warm, like a billowing curtain brushing against my skin as a gentle breeze turned the tiny apartment into a rapturous asylum from the craziness of the world. His fingers brushed against my arm as he held me, eyes open and intense, vulnerable and seeking.

The next kiss wasn’t an apology.

It was a
demand
. A demand on my part, as four years of pent up questions and sorrow came pouring forth from me, unbidden and unleashed.

And just then, Sam’s fingers rested on my arms and went perfectly still.

Chapter Four

Amy

4.5 years ago

I didn’t know that I could feel this sick to my stomach. National qualifiers for debate. The top three would go to national competition this summer. This was my third year here. My freshman year I’d competed in a different event in Speech, but switching over to Lincoln-Douglas debate had been a revelation. It turned out I was actually good at something other than writing papers, and just being the smart girl. When I got up in front of the judges, stood face to face against a single opponent, and crafted an argument on whatever topic they threw at us, my brain could click into place. It was like gears shifting in a machine, step by step, making connections.

Someone once told me that debating was like playing chess. You had to see how it was all going to end eight, ten, fifteen, twenty moves in advance, and to understand the possible consequences of each choice that you made. Every word that came out of your mouth, each sentence that you formed and put forth had to both convince that judge sitting out there in the audience that you had a better argument than the person you were trying to defeat, and unsettle your opponent enough so that he or she couldn’t do the same.

Using my mind to convince adults that I was more persuasive, that my facts were better, I felt unprecedented power—I could convince them that damn near anything I said was right.

It was incredibly rare, in teenage life, to be able to tell adults something and be believed. To be academically and intellectually capable of gathering research around an idea, of forming a case and then presenting it. I would stand with another teenager in front of two adults who might be teachers, who might be parents, former debaters—we never really knew who the judges were. Sometimes they were nuns from Catholic schools, sometimes they were incredibly bored nineteen year-olds who had just graduated and were there for the paltry amount of money that judges earned. Often they were debate coaches from other teams. Most of the time they were friendly, if a bit stone faced, trying to remain neutral and to judge on the merits of our cases.

It wasn’t a popularity contest. It wasn’t about looks. I didn’t have to be pretty. I didn’t have to be well dressed beyond looking professional and businesslike. I didn’t have to wear the right lipstick, or the perfect earrings, or be fashionable, or talk about the latest music, or movies.

I could talk about the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. I could talk about civil liberties, and questions about the rights of the majority versus the minority were my playing field—not perfumes and self-tanners. I got to stand up next to some damn fine guys from other high schools who wielded the same intellectual weapons that I did. I got to watch them dressed up like their dads, staking their claim across classroom floors, walking like men, shoulders squared, faces alert, taking me on in a test of intellectual merit.

Not in some ridiculous romantic game where I was supposed to read signals that were subtle or where subterfuge became some kind of twisted, sexual joke.

Oh, no, I was their equal. In fact, most of the time, I was their
better
. I could use information and analysis the way other girls used a hair flip or played with the neckline of their shirt. When these guys looked into my eyes they didn’t lick their lips—they ruffled their papers and straightened their arguments. The air crackled between us because the stakes were so high. High school debate—competing to go to Nationals? That was
huge
.

Living in the suburbs of Boston, with nationally-ranked school districts and parents who mortgaged their careers to get a house, everything was about competition. Getting into the right preschool, the right school district, having parents work extra hours to make sure that they could afford the house and the property taxes that came with being in a top ten school district—the pressure began before you were potty-trained.

I had to do all the
right
activities starting in middle school, learn the
right
instruments, speak the
right
foreign languages, volunteer at the
right
centers, all for the Holy Grail of getting into the best college possible. Around here that was Harvard, MIT and Yale—and if you couldn’t get into one of those top three, you were
lesser
. Right here, right now, as we got ready for the crackdown where people stopped making eye contact in the halls, where people—competitors that you’d joked with three weeks ago—suddenly clung to their notes and turned away, whispering in corners. This was real life.

All of it changed
relationships
.

I think that was the part that scared me the most; how eviscerated people felt as they were eliminated. Some of my debate friends hadn’t even made it this far, but Sam had. So far when I’d passed him in the halls he’d made eye contact, even smiled, though his face was a bit gray, and there was a sickly sense of something about him. Butterflies probably churned in his stomach as if someone had fed them meth.

We
all
felt that way. Every single one of us had spent the last few weeks poring over our cases, constructing careful analogies, worrying through wordings, sayings, and statistics. It was preparation for law school for plenty of us, and yet—nothing like it.

Let me explain how intense the world of Lincoln-Douglas debate can get. If you did well on your PSATs, the brochures began coming in. The emails started to pop up. You received invitations to visit the top debate teams at colleges across the country. Alluring and enticing comments about full tuition scholarships for a handful of students nationwide made you want to
win
. A phone call might even come from one of those top schools, a coach on the other end, friendly talks with your parents—all revolving around one thing.

Winning
. And not the Charlie Sheen kind.

It was nothing like sports. Most of us were sports rejects. A handful of golden boys and girls managed to balance it all. That definitely wasn’t me. For as mentally agile and coordinated as I was in a classroom or in a debate session, I might as well have been an octopus on roller skates when it came to a baseball, a soccer ball, a track hurdle or anything else other than the occasional recreational swim. College tuition was on the line for plenty of debaters, but I had a full ride already lined up. So for me, it was more ephemeral. I could go into this just wanting the glory, adding the notch on my academic belt.